“If … there were no solid bodies in nature there would be no geometry.”-Poincaré

A while ago, I discussed the mystery of why matter should be the source of gravity. To date, this remains simply an empirical fact. The deep insight of general relativity – that gravity is the geometry of space and time – only provides us with a modern twist: why should matter dictate the geometry of space-time?

There is a possible answer, but it requires us to understand space-time in a different way: as an abstraction that is derived from the properties of matter itself. Under this interpretation, it is perfectly natural that matter should affect space-time geometry, because space-time is not simply a stage against which matter dances, but is fundamentally dependent on matter for its existence. I will elaborate on this idea and explain how it leads to a new avenue of approach to quantum gravity.

First consider what we mean when we talk about space and time. We can judge how far away a train is by listening to the tracks, or gauge how deep a well is by dropping a stone in and waiting to hear the echo. We can tell a mountain is far away just by looking at it, and that the cat is nearby by tripping over it. In all these examples, an interaction is necessary between myself and the object, sometimes through an intermediary (the light reflected off the mountain into my eyes) and sometimes not (tripping over the cat). Things can also be far away in time. I obviously cannot interact with people who lived in the past (unless I have a time machine), or people who have yet to be born, even if they stood (or will stand) exactly where I am standing now. I cannot easily talk to my father when he was my age, but I can almost do it, just by talking to him now and asking him to remember his past self. When we say that something is far away in either space or time, what we really mean is that it is hard to interact with, and this difficulty of interaction has certain universal qualities that we give the names `distance’ and `time’.
It is worth mentioning here, as an aside, that in a certain sense, the properties of `time’ can be reduced to properties of `distance’ alone. Consider, for instance, that most of our interactions can be reduced to measurements of distances of things from us, at a given time. To know the time, I invariably look at the distance the minute hand has traversed along its cycle on the face of my watch. Our clocks are just systems with `internal’ distances, and it is the varying correspondence of these `clock distances’ with the distances of other things that we call the `time’. Indeed, Julian Barbour has developed this idea into a whole research program in which dynamics is fundamentally spatial, called Shape Dynamics.

Sigmund Freud Museum, Wien – Peter Kogler

So, if distance and time is just a way of describing certain properties of matter, what is the thing we call space-time?

We now arrive at a crucial point that has been stressed by philosopher Harvey Brown: the rigid rods and clocks with which we claim to measure space-time do not really measure it, in the traditional sense of the word `measure’. A measurement implies an interaction, and to measure space-time would be to grant space-time the same status as a physical body that can be interacted with. (To be sure, this is exactly how many people do wish to interpret space-time; see for instance space-time substantivalism and ontological structural realism).

Brown writes:“One of Bell’s professed aims in his 1976 paper on `How to teach relativity’ was to fend off `premature philosophizing about space and time’. He hoped to achieve this by demonstrating with an appropriate model that a moving rod contracts, and a moving clock dilates, because of how it is made up and not because of the nature of its spatio-temporal environment. Bell was surely right. Indeed, if it is the structure of the background spacetime that accounts for the phenomenon, by what mechanism is the rod or clock informed as to what this structure is? How does this material object get to know which type of space-time — Galilean or Minkowskian, say — it is immersed in?” [1]

I claim that rods and clocks do not measure space-time, they embody space-time. Space-time is an idealized description of how material rods and clocks interact with other matter. This distinction is important because it has implications for quantum gravity. If we adopt the more popular view that space-time is an independently existing ontological construct, it stands to reason that, like other classical fields, we should attempt to directly quantise the space-time field. This is the approach adopted in Loop Quantum Gravity and extolled by Rovelli:

“Physical reality is now described as a complex interacting ensemble of entities (fields), the location of which is only meaningful with respect to one another. The relation among dynamical entities of being contiguous … is the foundation of the space-time structure. Among these various entities, there is one, the gravitational field, which interacts with every other one and thus determines the relative motion of the individual components of every object we want to use as rod or clock. Because of that, it admits a metrical interpretation.” [2]

One of the advantages of this point of view is that it dissolves some seemingly paradoxical features of general relativity, such as the fact that geometry can exist without (non-gravitational) matter, or the fact that geometry can carry energy and momentum. Since gravity is a field in its own right, it doesn’t depend on the other fields for its existence, nor is there any problem with it being able to carry energy. On the other hand, this point of view tempts us into framing quantum gravity as the mathematical problem of quantising the gravitational field. This, I think, is misguided.

I propose instead to return to a more Machian viewpoint, according to which space-time is contingent on (and not independent of) the existence of matter. Now the description of quantum space-time should follow, in principle, from an appropriate description of quantum matter, i.e. of quantum rods and clocks. From this perspective, the challenge of quantum gravity is to rebuild space-time from the ground up — to carry out Einstein’s revolution a second time over, but using quantum material as the building blocks.

Ernst Mach vs. Max Ernst. Get it right, folks.

My view about space-time can be seen as a kind of `pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps’, or a Wittgenstein’s ladder (in which one climbs to the top of a ladder and then throws the ladder away). It works like this:Step 1: define the properties of space-time according to the behaviour of rods and clocks.Step 2: look for universal patterns or symmetries among these rods and clocks.Step 3: take the ideal form of this symmetry and promote it to an independently existing object called `space-time’.Step 4: Having liberated space-time from the material objects from which it was conceived, use it as the independent standard against which to compare rods and clocks.

Seen in this light, the idea of judging a rod or a clock by its ability to measure space or time is a convenient illusion: in fact we are testing real rods and clocks against what is essentially an embodiment of their own Platonic ideals, which are in turn conceived as the forms which give the laws of physics their most elegant expression. A pertinent example, much used by Julian Barbour, is Ephemeris time and the notion of a `good clock’. First, by using material bodies like pendulums and planets to serve as clocks, we find that the motions of material bodies approximately conform to Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravitation. We then make a metaphysical leap and declare the laws to be exactly true, and the inaccuracies to be due to imperfections in the clocks used to collect the data. This leads to the definition of the `Ephemeris time’, the time relative to which the planetary motions conform most closely to Newton’s laws, and a `good clock’ is then defined to be a clock whose time is closest to Ephemeris time.

The same thing happens in making the leap to special relativity. Einstein observed that, in light of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, the empirical law of the relativity of motion seemed to have only a limited validity in nature. That is, assuming no changes to the behaviour of rods and clocks used to make measurements, it would not be possible to establish the law of the relativity of motion for electrodynamic bodies. Einstein made a metaphysical leap: he decided to upgrade this law to the universal Principle of Relativity, and to interpret its apparent inapplicability to electromagnetism as the failure of the rods and clocks used to test its validity. By constructing new rods and clocks that incorporated electromagnetism in the form of hypothetical light beams bouncing between mirrors, Einstein rebuilt space-time so as to give the laws of physics a more elegant form, in which the Relativity Principle is valid in the same regime as Maxwell’s equations.

Ladder for Booker T. Washington – Martin Puryear

By now, you can guess how I will interpret the step to general relativity. Empirical observations seem to suggest a (local) equivalence between a uniformly accelerated lab and a stationary lab in a gravitational field. However, as long as we consider `ideal’ clocks to conform to flat Minkowski space-time, we have to regard the time-dilated clocks of a gravitationally affected observer as being faulty. The empirical fact that observers stationary in a gravitational field cannot distinguish themselves (locally) from uniformly accelerated observers then seems accidental; there appears no reason why an observer could not locally detect the presence of gravity by comparing his normal clock to an `ideal clock’ that is somehow protected from gravity. On the other hand, if we raise this empirical indistinguishability to a matter of principle – the Einstein Equivalence Principle – we must conclude that time dilation should be incorporated into the very definition of an `ideal’ clock, and similarly with the gravitational effects on rods. Once the ideal rods and clocks are updated to include gravitational effects as part of their constitution (and not an interfering external force) they give rise to a geometry that is curved. Most magically of all, if we choose the simplest way to couple this geometry to matter (the Einstein Field Equations), we find that there is no need for a gravitational force at all: bodies follow the paths dictated by gravity simply because these are now the inertial paths followed by freely moving bodies in the curved space-time. Thus, gravity can be entirely replaced by geometry of space-time.

As we can see from the above examples, each revolution in our idea of space-time was achieved by reconsidering the nature of rods and clocks, so as to make the laws of physics take a more elegant form by incorporating some new physical principle (eg. the Relativity and Equivalence principles). What is remarkable is that this method does not require us to go all the way back to the fundamental properties of matter, prior to space-time, and derive everything again from scratch (the constructive theory approach). Instead, we can start from a previously existing conception of space-time and then upgrade it by modifying its primary elements (rods and clocks) to incorporate some new principle as part of physical law (the principle theory approach). The question is, will quantum gravity let us get away with the same trick?

I’m betting that it will. The challenge is to identify the empirical principle (or principles) that embody quantum mechanics, and upgrade them to universal principles by incorporating them into the very conception of the rods and clocks out of which general relativistic space-time is made. The result will be, hopefully, a picture of quantum geometry that retains a clear operational interpretation. Perhaps even Percy Bridgman, who dismissed the Planck length as being of “no significance whatever” [3] due to its empirical inaccessibility, would approve.

PRINCIPLES AS TOOLS
(Not to be confused with using Principals as tools, which is what happens if your school Principal is a tool because he never taught you the difference between a Principal and a principle. Also not to be confused with a Princey-pal, who is a friend that happens to be a Prince).

`These principles are the boldly generalized results of experiment; but they appear to derive from their very generality a high degree of certainty. In fact, the greater the generality, the more frequent are the opportunities for verifying them, and such verifications, as they multiply, as they take the most varied and most unexpected forms, leave in the end no room for doubt.’ -Poincaré

One of the great things Einstein did, besides doing physics, was trying to explain to people how to do it as good as him. Ultimately he failed, because so far nobody has managed to do better than him, but he left us with some really interesting insights into how to come up with new physical theories.

One of these ideas is the concept of using `principles’. A principle is a statement about how the word works (or should work), stated in ordinary language. They are not always called principles, but might be called laws, postulates or hypotheses. I am not going to argue about semantics here. Just consider these examples to get a flavour:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: You can’t build an engine which does useful work and ends up back in its starting position without producing any heat.

The Principle of Relativity: It is impossible to tell by local experiments whether or not your laboratory is moving.

And some not strictly physics ones:

Shirky’s law: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Murphy’s law: If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Stigler’s law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer (this law was actually discovered by R.K. Merton, not Stigler).

Parkinson’s law: Work always expands to fill up the time allocated to doing it.
(See Wikipedia’s list of eponymous laws for more).

You’ll notice that principles are characterised by two main things: they ring true, and they are vague. Both of these properties are very important for their use in building theories.

Now I can practically hear the lice falling out as you scratch your head in confusion. “But Jacques! How can vagueness be a useful thing to have in a Principle? Shouldn’t it be made as precise as possible?”

No, doofus. A Principle is like an apple. You know what an apple is right?

Well, you think you do. But if I were to ask you, what colour is an apple, how sweet is an apple, how many worms are in an apple, you would have to admit that you don’t know, because the word “apple” is too vague to answer those questions. It is like asking how long is a piece of string. Nevertheless, when you want to go shopping, it suffices to say “buy me an apple” instead of “buy me a Malus domestica, reflective in the 620-750 nanometer range, ten percent sugar, one percent cydia pomonella“.

The only way to make a principle more precise is within the context of a precise theory. But then how would I build a new theory, if I am stuck using the language of the old theory? I can make the idea of an apple more precise using the various scientifically verified properties that apples are known to have, but all of that stuff had to come after we already had a basic vague understanding of what an “apple” was, e.g. a kind of round-ish thing on a tree that tastes nice when you eat it.

The vagueness of a principle means that it defines a whole family of possible theories, these being the ones that kind of fit with the principle if you take the right interpretation. On one hand, a principle that is too vague will not help you to make progress, because it will be too easy to make it fit with any future theory; on the other hand, a principle that is not vague enough will leave you stuck for choices and unable to progress.

The next aspect of a good principle is that it “rings true”. In other words, there is something about it that makes you want it to be true. We want our physical theories to be intuitive to our soft, human brains, and these brains of ours have evolved to think about the world in very specific terms. Why do you think physics seems to be all about the locations of objects in space, moving with time? There are infinitely many ways to describe physics, but we choose the ones we do because of the way our physical senses work, the way our bodies interact with the world, and the things we needed to do in order to survive up to this point. What is the principle of least action? It is a river flowing down a mountain. What is Newtonian mechanics? It is animals moving on the plains. We humans need to see the world in a special way in order to understand it, and good principles are what allow us to shoehorn abstract concepts like thermodynamics and gravitational physics into a picture that looks familiar to us, that we can work with.

That’s why a good principle has to ring true — it has to appeal to the limited imaginative abilities of us humans. Maybe if we were different animals, the laws of physics would be understood in very different terms. Like, the Newtonian mechanics of snakes would start with a simple model of objects moving along snake-paths in two dimensions (the ground), and then go from there to arbitrary motions and higher dimensions. So intelligent snakes might have discovered Fourier analysis way before humans would have, just because they would have been more used to thinking in wavy motions instead of linear motions.

So you see, coming up with good principles is really an art form, that requires you to be deeply in touch with your own humanity. Indeed, principle-finding is part of the great art of generating hypotheses. It is a pity that many scientists don’t practice hypothesis generation enough to realise that it is an art (or maybe they don’t practice art enough?) It is also ironic that science tries so hard to eliminate the human element from the theories, when it is so apparent in the final forms of the theories themselves. It is just like an artist who trains so hard to hide her brush strokes, to make the signature of her hand invisible, even though the subject of the painting is her own face.

Ok, now that we know what principles are, how do we find them? One of the best ways is by the age-old method of Induction. How does induction work? It really deserves its own post, but here it is in a nutshell. Let’s say that you are a turkey, and you observe that whenever the farmer makes a whistle, there is some corn in your bowl. So, being a smart turkey, you might decide to elevate this empirical pattern to a general principle, called the Turkey Principle: whenever the farmer whistles, there is corn in your bowl. BOOM, induction!

Now, what is the use of this principle? It helps you to narrow down which theories are good and which are bad. Suppose one day the farmer whistles but you discover there is not corn in the bowl, but rather rice. With your limited turkey imagination, you are able to come up with three hypotheses to explain this. 1. There was corn in the bowl when the farmer whistled, but then somebody came along and replaced it with rice; 2. the Turkey Principle should be amended to the Weak Turkey Principle, which states that when the farmer whistles, food, but not necessarily corn, will be in the bowl; 3. the contents of the bowl are actually independent of the farmer’s whistling, and the apparent link between these phenomena is just a coincidence. Now, with the aid of the Principle, we can see that there is a clear preference for hypothesis 1 over 2, and for 2 over 3, according to the extent that each hypothesis fits with the Turkey Principle.

This example makes it clear that deciding which patterns to upgrade to general principles, and which to regard as anomalies, is again a question of aesthetics and artistry. A more perceptive turkey might observe that the farmer is not a simple mechanistic process, but a complex and mysterious system, and therefore may not be subject to such strong constraints with regards to his whistling and corn-giving behaviour as are implied by the Turkey Principle. Indeed, were the turkey perceptive enough to guess at the farmer’s true motives, he might start checking the tool shed to see if the axe is missing before running to the food bowl every time the farmer whistles. But this turkey would no doubt be working on hypotheses of his own, motivated by principles of his own, such as the Farmer-is-Not-to-be-Trusted Principle (in connection with the observed correlation of turkey disappearances and family dinner parties).

An example more relevant to physics is Einstein’s Equivalence Principle: that no local experiment can determine whether the laboratory is in motion, or is stationary in a gravitational field. The principle is vague, as you can see by the number of variations, interpretations, and Weak and Strong versions that exist in the literature; but undoubtedly it rings true, since it appears to be widely obeyed all but the most esoteric phenomena, and it gels nicely with the Principle of Relativity. While the Equivalence Principle was instrumental in leading to General Relativity, it is a matter of debate how it should be formulated within the theory, and whether or not it is even true. Much like hammers and saws are needed to make a table, but are not needed after the table is complete, we use principles to make theories and then we set them aside when the theory is complete. The final theory makes predictions perfectly well without needing to refer to the principles that built it, and the principles are too vague to make good predictions on their own. (Sure, with enough fiddling around, you can sit on a hammer and eat food off a saw, but it isn’t really comfortable or easy).

For more intellectual reading on principle theories, see the SEP entry on Einstein’s Philosophy of Science, and Poincare’s excellent notes.

I recently returned to my roots, contributing to a new paper with Tim Ralph (who was my PhD advisor) on the very same topic that formed a major part of my PhD. Out of laziness, let me dig up the relevant information from an earlier post:

“The idea for my PhD thesis comes from a paper that I stumbled across as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. That paper, by Tim Ralph, Gerard Milburn and Tony Downes of the University of Queensland, proposed that Earth’s own gravitational field might be strong enough to cause quantum gravity effects in experiments done on satellites. In particular, the difference between the strength of gravity at ground-level and at the height of the orbiting satellite might be just enough to make the quantum particles on the satellite behave in a very funny non-linear way, never before seen at ground level. Why might this happen? This is where the story gets bizarre: the authors got their idea after looking at a theory of time-travel, proposed in 1991 by David Deutsch. According to Deutsch’s theory, if space and time were bent enough by gravity to create a closed loop in time (aka a time machine), then any quantum particle that travelled backwards in time ought to have a very peculiar non-linear behaviour. Tim Ralph and co-authors said: what if there was only a little bit of space-time curvature? Wouldn’t you still expect just a little bit of non-linear behaviour? And we can look for that in the curvature produced by the Earth, without even needing to build a time-machine!”

In our recent paper in New Journal of Physics, for the special Focus on Gravitational Quantum Mechanics, Tim and I re-examined the `event formalism’ (the fancy name for the nonlinear model in question) and we derived some more practical numerical predictions and ironed out a couple of theoretical wrinkles, making it more presentable as an experimental proposal. Now that there is growing interest in quantum gravity phenomenology — that is, testable toy models of quantum gravity effects — Tim’s little theory has an excitingly real chance of being tested and proven either right or wrong. Either way, I’d be curious to know how it turns out! On one hand, if quantum entanglement survives the test, the experiment would stand as one of the first real confirmations of quantum field theory in curved space-time. On the other hand, if the entanglement is destroyed by Earth’s gravitational field, it would signify a serious problem with the standard theory and might even confirm our alternative model. That would be great too, but also somewhat disturbing, since non-linear effects are known to have strange and confusing properties, such as violating the fabled uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

You can see my video debut here, in which I give an overview of the paper, complete with hand-drawn sketches!

(Actually there is a funny story attached to the video abstract. The day I filmed the video for this, I had received a letter informing me that my application for renewal of my residence permit in Austria was not yet complete — but the permit itself had expired the previous day! As a result, during the filming I was half panicking at the thought of being deported from the country. In the end it turned out not to be a problem, but if I seem a little tense in the video, well, now you know why.)

This is one of those questions that has always bugged me.
Suppose that, somewhere in the universe, there is a very large closed box made out of some kind of heavy, neutral matter. Inside this box a civilisation of intelligent creatures have evolved. They are made out of normal matter like you and me, except that for some reason they are very light — their bodies do not contain much matter at all. What’s more, there are no other heavy bodies or planets inside this large box aside from the population of aliens, whose total mass is too small to have any noticeable effect on the gravitational field. Thus, the only gravitational field that the aliens are aware of is the field created by the box itself (I’m assuming there are no other massive bodies near to the box).

Setting aside the obvious questions about how these aliens came to exist without an energy source like the sun, and where the heck the giant box came from, I want to examine the following question: in principle, is there any way that these aliens could figure out that matter is the source of gravitational fields?

Now, to make it interesting, let us assume the density of the box is not uniform, so there are some parts of its walls that have a stronger gravitational pull than others. Our aliens can walk around on these parts of the walls, and in some parts the aliens even become too heavy to support their own weight and get stuck until someone rescues them. Elsewhere, the walls of the box are low density and so the gravitational attraction to them is very weak. Here, the aliens can easily jump off and float away from the wall. Indeed, the aliens spend much of their time floating freely near the center of the box where the gravitational fields are weak. Apart from that, the composition of the box itself does not change with time and the box is not rotating, so the aliens are quickly able to map out the constant gravitational field that surrounds them inside the box, with its strong and weak points.

Like us, the aliens have developed technology to manipulate the electromagnetic field, and they know that it is the electromagnetic forces that keeps their bodies intact and stops matter from passing through itself. More importantly, they can accelerate objects of different masses by pushing on them, or applying an electric force to charged test bodies, so they quickly discover that matter has inertia, measured by its mass. In this way, they are able to discover Newton’s laws of mechanics. In addition, their experiments with electromagnetism and light eventually lead them to upgrade their picture of space-time, and their Newtonian mechanics is replaced by special relativistic mechanics and Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field.

So far, so good! Except that, because they do not observe any orbiting planets or moving gravitating bodies (their own bodies being too light to produce any noticible attractive forces), they still have not reproduced Newtonian gravity. They know that there is a static field permeating space-time, called the gravitational field, that seems to be fixed to the frame of the box — but they have no reason to think that this gravitational force originates from matter. Indeed, there are two philosophical schools of thought on this. The first group holds that the gravitational field is to be thought of analogously to the electromagnetic field, and is therefore sourced by special “gravitational charges”. It was originally claimed that the material of the box itself carries gravitational charge, but scrapings of the material from the box revealed it to be the same kind of matter from which the aliens themselves were composed (let’s say Carbon) and the scrapings themselves seemed not to produce any gravitational fields, even when collected together in large amounts of several kilograms (a truly humungous weight to the minds of the aliens, whose entire population combined would only weigh ten kilograms). Some aliens pointed out that the gravitational charge of Carbon might be extremely weak, and since the mass of the entire box was likely to be many orders of magnitude larger than anything they had experienced before, it is possible that its cumulative charge would be enough to produce the field. However, these aliens were criticised for making ad-hoc modifications to their theory to avoid its obvious refutation by the kilograms-of-Carbon experiments. If gravity is analogous to the electromagnetic force — they were asked with a sneer — then why should it be so much weaker than electromagnetism? It seemed rather too convenient.

Some people suggested that the true gravitational charge was not Carbon, but some other material that coated the outside of the box. However, these people were derided even more severely than were the Carbon Gravitists (as they had become known). Instead, the popular scientific consensus shifted to a modern idea in which the gravitational force was considered to be a special kind of force field that simply had no source charges. It was a God-given field whose origin and patterns were not to be questioned but simply accepted, much like the very existence of the Great Box itself. This following gained great support when someone made a great discovery: the gravitational force could be regarded as the very geometry of spacetime itself.

The motivation for this was the peculiar observation, long known but never explained, that massive bodies always had the same acceleration in the gravitational field regardless of their different masses. A single alien falling towards one of the gravitating walls of the box would keep speed perfectly with a group of a hundred Aliens tied together, despite their clearly different masses. This dealt a crushing blow to the remnants of the Carbon Gravitists, for it implied that the gravitational charge of matter was exactly proportional to its inertial mass. This coincidence had no precedent in electromagnetism, where it was known that bodies of the same mass could have very different electric charges.

Under the new school of thought, the gravitational force was reinterpreted as the background geometry of space-time inside the box, which specified the inertial trajectories of all massive bodies. Hence, the gravitational force was not a force at all, so it was meaningless to ascribe a “gravitational charge” to matter. Tensor calculus was developed as a natural extension of special relativity, and the aliens derived the geodesic equation describing the motion of matter in a fixed curved space-time metric. The metric of the box was mapped out with high precision, and all questions about the universe seemed to have been settled.

Well, almost all. Some troublesome philosophers continued to insist that there should be some kind of connection between space-time geometry and matter. They wanted more than just the well-known description of how geometry caused matter to move: they tried to argue that matter should also tell space-time how to curve.

“Our entire population combined only weighs a fraction of the mass of the box. What would happen if there were more matter available to us? What if we did the Carbon-kilogram experiment again, but with 100 kilograms? Or a million? Surely the presence of such a large amount of matter would have an effect on space-time itself?”

But these philosophers were just laughed at. Why should any amount of matter affect the eternal and never-changing space-time geometry? Even if the Great Box itself were removed, the prevailing thought was that the gravitational field would remain, fixed as it was in space-time and not to any material source. So they all lived happily ever after, in blissful ignorance of the gravitational constant G, planetary orbits, and other such fantasies.

***

Did you find this fairytale disturbing? I did. It illustrates what I think is an under-appreciated uncomfortable feature of our best theories of gravity: they all take the fact that matter generates gravity as a premise, without justification apart from empirical observation. There’s nothing strictly wrong with this — we do essentially the same thing in special relativity when we take the speed of light to be constant regardless of the motion of its source, historically an empirically determined fact (and one that was found quite surprising).

However, there is a slight difference: one can in principle argue that the speed of light should be reference-frame independent from philosophical grounds, without appealing to empirical observations. Roughly, the relativity principle states that the laws of physics should be the same in all frames of motion, and from among the laws of physics we can include the non-relativistic equations of the electromagnetic field, from which the constant speed of light can be derived from the electric and magnetic constants of the vacuum. As far as I know, there is no similar philosophical grounding for the connection between matter and geometry as embodied by the gravitational constant, and hence no compelling reason for our hypothetical aliens to ever believe that matter is the source of space-time geometry.

Could it be that there is an essential piece missing from our accounts of the connection between matter and space-time? Or are our aliens are doomed by their unfortunately contrived situation, never to deduce the complete laws of the universe?